Hi,
while looking at "workstations" on Ebay i found some SPARC-Ultra1 (model 170) machines. I'm just curious, how fast those machines are? (with Gentoo on board :)). Does anybody has any SPARC-Ultra1 experiences? Could anyone compare such station to some classic PC Gentoo based box? Or should i look for something better?
I'm not a QUAKE8 fan, i don't need a super-duper-end machine. All i need is quite fast shell ;), Icewm under X'es and Mozilla to browse. My current machine is PC mainboard from 1997, AMD K6-450 MHz (socket7) and pci gfx card (Riva128). And that's enough!. The key is distributed computing; i have different computers working as fieserwers, app-servers, internet gateways and so on. :). Will Ultra1 be significant slower or faster than mentioned "workstation"?

and finally: any hints while buing/assembling SPARC-Ultra1 Gentoo Workstation?

since this is a sparc, that 167Mhz is about the equivilent of a pentium2 266-300Mhz, not exact bacause of the different architecture but thats as close as i can guess.

it does use only the SBus(SunBUS) so it may be expensive to get addon cards. it does use standard SIMM memory, which is cheap and easy to get on ebay. i would say that unless this thing is VERY cheap then you could get a cheap PC with ANY duron in it for very little, and it would run circles around one of these.

i would reccomend not getting one. they are not speedy by any means, and the SBus is not your friend. you might run into trouble finding drivers for SBus cards is linux as well.

Thanks for the valuable answer. So, I think, I'll maybe buy one of those Ultras someday, but just for fun. It'll be not a system-critical node in whole network, but a new experience (i never have had Sun machine on my own before).

So, I think, I'll maybe buy one of those Ultras someday, but just for fun. It'll be not a system-critical node in whole network

now remember, i said its not FAST, BUT a SUN ULTRA1/170 is going to be extremely reliable hardware. Sun makes good stuff. if it werent so slow i would recommed one inn an instant, and if its cheap enough it would make a great router or firewall.

Someone once told me SBus is internally known as Schoolbus. If I'm not mistaken, it was introduced first in the sun4c architecture (c for Campus.. you drive to campus in a schoolbus).
They've got all sorts of funny names, best know is probably the hme-card. It was supposed to be called Big-Mac but McDonalds opposed to this so they called it hme: Happy Meal Ethernet.